Warhammer 40,000: Darktide News

We just went live with patch 1.0.30.

There are too many Patch Notes to list in a single Steam Announcement -- at the bottom of the page is a button that will take you to the full suite of changes. Included here are notes for all the additions and just some of the changes in patch 1.0.30:

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[h2]New & Updated Features: [/h2]

[h3]Wargear Sets[/h3]
Wargear Sets are now available for customisation in Darktide!

Saving a wargear set will save your currently equipped loadout (of Weapons & Curios), cosmetics, and your chosen talents.

You can create up to 5 sets, and customise the set in the UI with an icon to designate what it may be configured for or to differentiate them.



[h3]Armoury Exchange[/h3]
The Armoury Exchange now has the option available (“Brunt’s Armoury”) to acquire a specific weapon by its mark (Mk). Both Melee and Ranged weapon marks are available once you have unlocked them by reaching the appropriate level. Brunt’s Armoury stocks the most common weapons only (Profane sanctity), and each weapon starts at a base price and scales with the player’s level just like the prices for weapons in other stores.



You can now preview cosmetic gear, and weapon skins. You can choose to preview these items on your current character or a holographic mannequin.

[h3]Sire Melk's Requisitorium[/h3]
We’re making a few changes to Sire Melk’s weekly contracts.

All contract tasks have undergone a rebalance by lowering their required targets to complete while also increasing the amount of Ordo Ingots that they provide. The Side Mission tasks for both Scriptures and Grimoires have been collapsed into the same task, which will progress as you collect either item upon a successful Mission completion.

We’ve also removed contracts that required playing specific side objectives on specific Missions.

Additionally, we are also removing the cap that was in place on the amount of times you can re-roll a given task. The system will continue to re-roll tasks until you have re-rolled all available tasks, which it will then begin again to choose from previously rolled out tasks. The cost of dockets required will continue to increase on each re-roll.

New Contracts available:

• Collect Diamantine
  • Targets: 100/200/350 for a reward of 160/370/700 Ordo Ingots.
• Collect Plasteel
  • Targets: 250/400/750 for a reward of 160/280/600 Ordo Ingots.
• Collect Scriptures or Grimoires
  • Targets: 4/8/16 for an updated reward of 150/335/700 Ordo Ingots.

Updated Contracts:

• Kill Monstrosities
  • New targets: 2/4/7 for an updated reward of 160/370/700 Ordo Ingots.
• Complete Missions
  • New targets: 5/8/12 for an updated reward of 120/310/590 Ordo Ingots.
• Complete Missions with no player deaths
  • New targets: 1/3/6 for an updated reward of 120/280/580 Ordo Ingots.
• Kill Dregs with Melee
  • Targets: 500/750/1000 for an updated reward of 100/230/530 Ordo Ingots.
• Kill Dregs with Ranged
  • Targets: 500/750/1000 for an updated reward of 100/230/530 Ordo Ingots.
• Kill Scabs with Melee
  • Targets: 500/750/1000 for an updated reward of 100/230/530 Ordo Ingots.
• Kill Scabs with Ranged
  • Targets: 500/750/1000 for an updated reward of 100/230/530 Ordo Ingots.

[h3]Shrine of the Omnissiah[/h3]
Prices of actions within the Shrine have been adjusted. The cost of Shrine actions will now adjust based on the rating of the item being modified. This makes it much more viable for modification at lower levels over the course of progression within the game. We’ve also resolved an issue where an item's rating would appear to lower in the preview. This was a visual bug only, and did not actually lower the rating level.

Consecrating at the Shrine has had cost adjustments, where Diamantine is no longer required to upgrade to the Anointed (Blue rarity) level. Together with purchasing Marks directly from Brunt’s Armoury, this makes it easier to upgrade and earn Blessings as desired.

We’re expanding the functionality of the crafting within Darktide with the final steps which are connected to the Blessings of weapons.

Earn Blessing
You can now extract a Blessing from a weapon in your inventory, which will sacrifice the weapon in the process. After extracting the Blessing, you will earn the permanent ability to use this Blessing on another weapon of the same mark. Earned Blessings are shared between all characters on your account.

Re-Bless Weapon
You can now change a Blessing on a weapon, by swapping out an existing Blessing on a weapon with one of your earned Blessings. Each weapon pattern has unique Blessings available to them, and you can only swap these with Blessings belonging to the same pattern.

When re-Blessing, you must choose an existing Blessing to replace on the weapon; if your weapon has another Blessing it will be locked in place.



[h3]Mission Board[/h3]
The Mission Board will see an increase in the number of available Missions that appear. We are increasing them from 12 to 16 available Missions.

The balance of difficulty, maps, and Conditions / Side Missions has also been adjusted to account for the increase in availability. Timers for regular Missions on the board have been decreased to a max of 15 minutes.

The rewards for Side Missions and Conditions are no longer the same values, and have now been individualised. This means that both Side Missions and Conditions will award different amounts of XP and Dockets, which will also increase in total amount awarded with a higher difficulty chosen.

Modifier for each Side Mission / Condition per difficulty level:

• Collect Grimoires:
  • +60% Dockets
  • +25% XP
• Collect Scriptures:
  • +20% Dockets
  • +40% XP
• Ventilation Purge:
  • +30% Dockets
  • +20% XP
• Hunting Grounds:
  • +40% Dockets
  • +30% XP
• Power Supply Interruption:
  • +35% Dockets
  • +25% XP
• High Resistance:
  • +45% Dockets
  • +40% XP
• Low Resistance:
  • No change

The availability of crafting materials found within the Mission has been increased:

• Plasteel
  • Uprising from 195 to 205
  • Malice from 255 to 265
  • Heresy from 300 to 440
  • Damnation from 395 to 805
• Diamantine
  • Uprising from 30 to 40
  • Malice from 95 to 125
  • Heresy from 170 to 195
  • Damnation from 295 to 300

[h3]Emperor’s Gift[/h3]
The Emperor’s Gift will now be awarded upon every successful Mission completion.

Playing at a higher difficulty level will increase the chances of a higher rarity item being gifted.

Additionally, Conditions will also affect the chances of increasing the rarity of items being gifted.

[h3]Item Generation[/h3]
Significant upgrades have been made to the foundations of how we generate items (Weapons & Curios), and how they are distributed in the game across different sources.

Items Consecrated (upgraded in rarity) in the Shrine of the Omnissiah now have more favourable chances of unlocking higher tier Perks & Blessings.

The Armoury Exchange requisition list will often see items with Tier 1 & 2 Perks / Blessings, while Sire Melk's Requisitions will often have items with Tier 3 & 4 Perks / Blessings for characters at level 30.

[h3]Character Creation[/h3]
A number of visual updates have been applied to the character creation screens:

• Class selection has received an update in the UI.
  
• Updated several UI elements such as buttons and scroll indicators to be consistent with the rest of the game.
  
• When selecting a home system, the camera will now pan smoothly from one planet to the next.

[h3]Social Menu[/h3]
Chosen Portrait Frames will now display for the users / characters that you see inside the social menu.

[h3]Emotes[/h3]


The ability for your avatar to emote has been added to the hub of the Mourningstar. All players now have emote slots available to equip an emote to. Holding the [Jump] key will open up an emote wheel where you can choose an emote. Characters will receive the following emotes to equip:

• Veteran, Psyker, Zealot:
  • Wave
  • Thumbs Up
  • No
  • Squat
  • Kneel
• Ogryn:
  • Wave
  • Thumbs Up
  • Nah ah
  • Safety First
  • Kneel

[h3]Quality of Life[/h3]
Added the ability to sort item lists in stores and your inventory, by the item type and item rating.

[h3]HUD[/h3]
All weapon marks now have a unique HUD icon and will no longer share one icon for the entire weapon pattern.

For example, you can now see the difference between each of the Psyker’s staves clearly.

[h3]Commodore's Vestures[/h3]
Updated the UI when inspecting an item bundle, to show more clearly how to purchase a single item inside the bundle if you wish to do so. Previously this step was inside the Inspect view of the single item.
Updated the purchase confirmation step with a much larger text of the item or bundle you are wanting to purchase.

[h3]Hunting Grounds [/h3]
We have taken a long hard look at the Hunting Grounds Condition and want to test a couple of changes. As a baseline we want these types of modifiers to be more distinct and less of a continuous challenge throughout the Mission, so we’re changing the format. A handful of spawns of rebalanced and tuned dog packs will occur during a Hunting Ground Mission, with some tender loving care put into the pacing and general presentation. The Pox Hounds themselves have gotten some attention, with a focus on fixing issues with their movement, smoothing out ragdoll transitions and sternly telling them to not spontaneously try space travel. It’s a work in progress.

We want to test this in limited capacity in the coming rotations of the Mission Board. Hopefully it will give a clear sense of when the Condition kicks in and provide for a fun experience to overcome or die horribly screaming together. Please check it out and give us feedback, we want to find a format that works together with the community so that we can add variation and replayability to our Missions.

[h3]Weapon Balance[/h3]
As part of this update we took a pass at each weapon's available Blessings, tuning and fixing them as we went along. The intent is to raise the weaker choices and fix interactions that were flawed in order to provide a wider palette of interesting choices to pick from. Most changes include buffs to Blessings as they were in general modest or sometimes downright pointless in their old format. There are a lot of combinations to test and tune so please keep the feedback coming and we’ll keep the full Blessing configuration of each weapon as part of our patch rotation in the future.

We’ve presented all changes to each weapon listed together with fixes, Blessing tweaks, and a couple of balance changes mixed in. In general, we want to approach weapon balancing on a per-package rotation, focusing on one weapon pattern at a time. You can see the full balance patch notes over on the Fatshark Forums.

[h3]Rejects, [/h3]

Last week we saw the release of Patch 1.0.25 and Hotfix 1.0.26, which was focused mainly on tweaks and balance of weapons as well as some quality-of-life additions. We also published a Dev Blog that took a deep dive into the upcoming changes to the Shrine of the Omnissiah. From this, we saw a great amount of constructive feedback that we will keep in mind going forward, as well as some burning questions - which we will answer here.

How do you get different Blessing tiers?
When you surrender a weapon to Hadron, you will receive the Blessing from that weapon at its current tier. To get higher blessing tiers, you will need to find weapons with an improved tier on them and surrender those weapons to Hadron.

Will you be making any changes to resource drops?
Yes! We will be increasing the amount of crafting resources you find in missions and adjusting the resources you find at higher difficulties to include more plasteel.

Upcoming Patch
We will be releasing a larger patch containing all of the changes to the Shrine of the Omnissiah and more by the end of February! Here is a bit of a sneak peek of what you can expect from the upcoming patch:

• Changes to the Mission Board - We will increase the number of available missions on the mission board from 12 to 16 and the difficulty distribution of the missions with higher difficulties getting more representation. We will also lower the mission timers, so that by the time you complete a mission a new one has rotated in!
  
• Changes to the Shrine - We will be adding the ability to earn Blessings permanently and be able to re-bless your weapons.
  
• Changes to the Armoury Exchange - We will release a new feature to the Armoury Exchange where players can acquire any weapon type by its mark (Mk) that has been unlocked by achieving the minimum level required.
  
• Changes to the amount of experience and currency earned on Side Missions - Both Side Missions and Conditions will now award different values of XP and Ordos Dockets. They will also scale in the amount given relative to the difficulty level of the mission they are attached to.
  
• Emotes?! - We're beginning to add more social interactions to the hub world of the Mourningstar. Following the next patch, you will be able to equip yourself with emotes and say hello to your fellow rejects!
  

We look forward to seeing you in the next update!

The makers of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide have laid out their plans to improve the co-op shooter's shopping and crafting systems. The gear system changes, due to arrive in the next patch, do sound like improvements to the current state of things. These plans do not sound better than entirely ending the tedious grinds of random rolls and making numbers bigger. Why improve when it would be better to remove?

Read more

For today’s blog, we will outline some of the features and changes we are actively working on in our next major patch and discuss how we arrived at making some of these changes in detail.

[h3]An Update on the Shrine[/h3]

Before Darktide’s launch date, we brought an update on the different features we were working on for the game's crafting systems.

The functionality of these crafting features was completed in December, and internally we began playtesting how they functioned, felt, and fit within the game. This led us to identify key issues with our features surrounding Blessings (Earn Blessing, Fuse/Combine Blessing, and Re-Bless). We were not happy with releasing these features to our players in their current implementation. We are going to explain further why we arrived at this decision.

Throughout the launch period for Darktide, we began to receive feedback from players playing the game in its entirety. One of the loudest feedback points we saw was exposing issues in our acquisition methods for items. We identified that these issues for item acquisition would be further compounded by the Blessing crafting features we had implemented. It would result in a frustrating experience for players. We decided to hold back the additional crafting functionality while we revisit our item acquisition systems to alleviate the would-be strain on the crafting system. With that choice in place, we set ourselves upon the task of reworking some of our sources for item acquisition, and we will cover these topics first and then dive into the changes we are making for crafting moving forward.

So, how will crafting change from Vermintide to Darktide? In Vermintide crafting was focused around creating, salvaging, and modifying items obtained through reward chests and through the crafting of blueprints. There are some similarities between the two games with the modification options, yet Darktide will carve its own path when it comes to crafting. Instead it is centred around modifying weapons rather than weapon creation, and will have a heavier focus on acquiring exciting items of different potential through many sources in the game.

[h3]Equipment in Darktide[/h3]

For Darktide, we wanted to set a different direction for the items characters will choose to equip. We want each weapon, and curio players find in Darktide to have a distinctive difference of potential within. The foundation we set with Modifiers, Perks, and Blessings changes how each weapon can potentially perform. The combination of these offers an exciting array of variety, and we want players to continue acquiring many variations in pursuit of interesting build diversity. This build potential exists today, and as a teaser for our next major patch, players can look forward to easily saving and loading preset builds that they can customise!

This direction for items having exciting hidden potential is where our sources for acquiring items in Darktide come into effect. We consider the armoury Exchange to be an expansion of the mission completion phase, where the dockets players receive allow them to choose their own reward from this store or save them for a more interesting option should they find one later. In reality, we acknowledge the feedback that players desire further agency within the Armoury Exchange. We will release a new feature to the Armoury Exchange where players can acquire any weapon type by its mark (Mk) that has been unlocked by achieving the minimum level required. This will be made available in the next patch to Darktide.



Acquiring weapons through this new requisition system in the Armoury, will give players a common (Profane rarity) weapon of a varying item rating according to their character's current level. It is worth noting that Profane weapons in Darktide have the most potential of becoming powerful weapons in combination with their base modifiers and via upgrades through crafting. To accompany this new feature, we will improve the selection of items in the hourly catalogue in both the base item rating range and their potential.

[h3]Further changes to Item Acquisition[/h3]

To accompany these changes to the Armoury Exchange, we will make further changes to the other sources of acquiring items within Darktide.

The Emperor’s Gift, which was occasionally received upon successful mission completion, will now be granted upon every mission completion without any limit by time, as was previously the case. In addition, the Emperor’s Gift will be influenced by several factors: The difficulty of the chosen mission and the conditions and side missions completed. Both factors will improve the chances of receiving an item with higher potential.

Sire Melk’s Requisitorium is another source of item acquisition, and we will also be implementing some changes in the next patch. We are reducing the amount of work each contract asks of players and increasing the reward (Ingots) players will receive for completing the task. The collection of Grimoires and Scriptures will be collapsed into a single contract for completing these collectible side-missions. We will also add a couple of new contracts for collecting both Plasteel, and Diamantine.

Importantly, in addition to these changes to the contracts offered, we will be improving the quality of the weapons offered by the daily catalogue and through the mystery acquisitions.

[h3]Unlocking Crafting[/h3]

Shortly after the Winter break, we re-evaluated the direction we were going in with crafting in
the future. This set us up to ensure that any changes we made now in the short term would set us on the best possible path to and synergize with future features and content. A significant part of this work was confirming the direction for weapon blessings and where they will fit in the future. While we are excited about the direction we chose to take blessings, we will save that discussion for another time.
Having the future direction affirmed, we could make the necessary decisions and changes required to release the final parts of the crafting system.

The first major change from the previous crafting implementation we discussed is that we will
not be implementing the Fuse / Combine blessing functionality. Instead, earning a blessing will
permanently unlock the ability to re-bless with that blessing at any time. We made this decision as it compliments where we will take blessings in the future, and it greatly alleviates the number
of items that one would need to acquire, not only the ability to re-bless but also what you can re-bless with. As stated in the previous section about equipment, we expect players to
switch and try out new weapons as they discover different and exciting potential
combinations and builds. Earning the ability to permanently re-bless allows for a far more enjoyable and less time-consuming experience and an easier time experimenting with interesting builds for your characters.

In combination with this, we are also improving the other aspects of crafting. We have implemented a cost scaling system that will change the total material costs required depending on the weapons item rating, for all actions at the Shrine of the Omnissiah. Let’s recap all the available crafting features, including what will be present in the next patch:



[h3]Consecrate[/h3]
Upgrades the rarity of Weapons and Curios. Upgrading Profane & Redeemed will cost Plasteel, and after that Plasteel and Diamantine are required.

[h3]Refine Perk[/h3]
Refine a single perk on an item to roll for a new perk selected at random by Hadron. The perk that was not chosen to be refined will become locked for this weapon.

[h3]Earn Blessing[/h3]
Surrender the entire weapon to Hadron, thereby losing it in the process. Players can then select a Blessing to earn the right to permanently re-bless other weapons with the earned blessing. Blessings are shared across different weapon marks of the same weapon type.

[h3]Re-Bless[/h3]
Players can choose to replace a single blessing on the weapon with a blessing of choice they have earned the right to use. The other blessing that was not chosen will become locked.

[h3]Patch #4: Blessings of the Omnissiah[/h3]

As mentioned previously, the next patch to Darktide will include these changes to the crafting system and item acquisition. We will continue to monitor feedback once it is in your hands, and we will continue to make adjustments and changes if necessary.

There are a number of additional new features, changes, and improvements to come in this next patch which we’ll be discussing in our next Community Comm-Link.

We greatly appreciate both the passion and feedback we have received so far on Darktide. As we continue to work on addressing many of these areas brought up by our community, we will continue to welcome the ongoing discussion to further shape and evolve the game for many years to come.

Thank you all for reading, and we will see you again in the next Comm-Link.

Darktide Team